Scientific consulting and medical writing: stay connected!!

Today, the world goes fast, very fast. Today, we cannot be satisfied only with our learning from our training or professional career. Our mission : snoopping, digging, searching … well being curious!

The world of health moves, moves, moves!

The world, including that of health, moves at high speed. At the medical level, a real revolution has taken place since the entire genome sequencing in 2003. NBIC, convergence of Nanotechnology, Biomedicine, data processing (« Informatique » in french) and Cognitive Science, accelerates the process. With the development of “super-computers” as Watson from IBM company, wich amazing computing potencies are far beyond those of humans, our understanding of diseases has risen dramatically (1). As an example, “the eradication of cancer, which appeared difficult to imagine until 10 years ago, is a serious prospect to near maturity“, according to Laurent Alexandre in his last book (1). With 2.0 oncology, sequencing of tumors associated with the development of therapies specifically targeting each tumor, a new paradigm is emerging: one patient, one tumor, one treatment. According to Laurent Alexandre, given the advances already made and those to come, cancer would be mastered by 2030 (1).

And we only speak about ultra-powerful computers that can meet this new « big-data » medicine. Beyond this tremendous progress, there is not a single day without a medical paper on a new app, a new connected object or another dedicated software.

In the words of a recent article from the Maddyness website, “we are witnessing larger ruptures than any we have experienced so far.” We cannot miss that point (2).

To stay informed, stay connected

To find information that is the heart of our medical writer work and to stay closed to the innovations to deliver the most appropriate scientific advice, many tools give us quite a boost:

– Social networks: I confess, before quite reluctant to this communication way, I am now addicted to Twitter. Why? A source of unlimited and easy to read information. It is possible to identify in a few words if an information is worth or not and to set aside articles, opinions that could be useful later for our medical writing work. After checking the information from sources, this first step allows us to find ideas, topics to be addressed, to supply a regular scientific monitoring … In brief! Subscribe, tweet 1 hour every day and the return on investment is insured!

– Conferences: Seminars are held regularly in many cities (not only in Paris). Participate to them not only could get you « fresh air » and look up from your computer, but also allows to fish information closed to healthcare’s actors, to medical and scientific research, to digital professionals and thus feed our work of medical writing and scientific advice. Many of these conferences are free, why don’t using it? One website to stay informed : https://www.eventbrite.fr/

– Events such as e-health Hackathon held in March 2015 in Paris (http://www.hackathon-esante.fr/). Although we gain nothing financially, we gain in knowledge, networking, visibility … I was able to get my teammates a scientificadvice that was useful to feed the content of the app we imagined. It was an exciting experience!

– Medical information websites: subscribing to their newsletters, we regularly receive latest news on a variety of topics. These informations have already been selected and analyzed from among those published daily in major scientific and medical journals. A first sorting is done, so that it saves precious time. It depends to us to check the relevance of the data by reading the source of this information.

In brief, our medical writing work is certainly to write but before reaching this stage, we must snoop, sniff out the information of interest, anticipate, in other words be curious.

So stay connected, the world of health moves, we should move with it !!